LDAP in complex environment - call for experiences (fwd)

[Jiri Sitera <sitera@civ.zcu.cz>]

Hello,

I'm from University of West Bohemia, Czech Republic. We have distributed
environment (Athena like - AFS, Kerberos, ...) in our campus and we are
going to use directory services (LDAP protocol) as unified interface for
all informations used there. 

It mean informations about users, accounts, machines, software,
configurations, etc. etc. - very complex information base for management
of whole campus. 

We are finding solution for hierarchical management of such informations. 
We are using (MIT) Moira management system (database) now and
we decided to convert it to LDAP (or make LDAP based interface to it). 


Please, let me know your comments and please give me pointers in this main
areas:

- security infrastructure integration (public key and kerberos auth., maybe
  DCE)

- data representation - schema for such data and purposes; for example I
  decided make separate representation (entry) for 'people' and 'account'
  for each user - what about it?; what about representation of resources
  (machines, printers, file-space capacity, ...) 

- extensible and modular directory (LDAP) browser (I'm testing Jerry
  Gawor's Browser (JNDI))

- database and directory integration (synchronization, accessing data stored
  in relational database via LDAP, ...); (as first step we are going to work
  on DS back end implemented in Oracle - any comments?)

- 'metacomputing' issues (we are working on project of virtual distributed
  metacomputer made by key supercomputing centers in Czech academic world) are
  interesting too (infrastructure for job planning, resource navigation,
  load balancing, etc.) 


- we are testing Netscape directory server, so we are also interested in
  experiences with writing plug-ins for it and so on


Please, let me know if you are working on similar projects.



BTW, I'm planning a trip to US (above all Decorum conference) and
I wonder to meet some interesting people and place where I can reach some
of key issues for our project.



Thank You very much for Your time.


Best regards,

  Jiri
                                                          Jiri Sitera
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e-mail: sitera@civ.zcu.cz                                            (Japi)
office: Univerzitni 20, 306 14 Plzen, phone: 019/7291 580             ||||
address: Delnicka 493, 345 06 KDYNE, Czech republic                  /||||\
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